School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,61

and they’re threatened with their safety, they wouldn’t think of going to the police. For one thing, these men would kill them.” He swallowed. “Sophie in particular—she’s disposable to them. And Max could be sold, or he could be turned into a mobster. We just don’t know. But—” He grimaced and took another bite. “—I don’t think my parents are going to get them back, whether I go to jail or not.”

“Why not?” Jackson asked, horrified.

“Because….” Tage’s voice broke. “Things the guard said to me, about making it easier on my parents and letting the jail take me. He was telling me to let myself get killed. But he didn’t… use them as a threat. He used them as an example.”

Jackson took a deep breath and realized he had to work hard to keep his cold hands from shaking. “Do you think they’re already dead?”

Tage breathed shakily and put the last bite of his burrito down. “No,” he said gruffly. “I think—what were his words?—‘You can be on the road to becoming pretty meat, just like them.’” He looked at Jackson bleakly. “They have been taken somewhere not here,” he said, his eyes red. “I… I don’t know how to find them.”

Jackson nodded and gave Tage a look he hoped inspired confidence. “Well, lucky you, while I really would make a shitty lawyer, I’m not a half-bad investigator. I’ve got some ideas. But first, I need a name. It can be an obvious name or a whispered name. The name of a person or the name of a group. You gave me Siderov, but I don’t know who that is.”

Tage nodded his head and leaned back against the seat rest, closing his eyes briefly. “Dima Siderov. He runs—or owns or whatever—the apartment in my parents’ building. You can’t go there, though.” He sat up. “He’ll know. They’ll all know, and they’ll kill my folks.”

Jackson nodded. “The name is the thing, kid.”

Tage yawned, and Jackson almost took pity on him, but the idea of the kid asleep in the car, defenseless and vulnerable, did not sit well either.

He almost wished he’d driven the Tank.

“You ready? The sooner we move, the sooner we can get you someplace you can get some sleep.”

Tage nodded and shook himself, and then grabbed the soda and took a hit, saluting with it before he dragged it with him out of the car. “Away we go,” he said gamely.

“Good kid.”

Jackson pulled out his phone and texted Ellery as they walked into the building. Talk to Herrera about the leak—Tage and I are going to the HT department.

A few years ago, before he’d hooked up with Ellery, Jackson had worked a case for their old firm in which someone who’d flown from Mexico to the United States on a work visa was then imprisoned and made to work in a factory with no pay and no option to leave. He’d killed his supervisor in an attempt to get away.

Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson and Cooper hadn’t been all bad. Lyle Langdon, Jackson’s immediate supervisor at the time, had taken the case pro bono, and Jackson had gotten a chance to meet Eleanor Sodhi and Ethan Pasternak, the two DAs in charge of human trafficking offenses.

Eleanor was thin as a whisper, her long black hair elegantly coifed, only a few grays to indicate she had grandchildren. Certainly her snapping black eyes didn’t give her away. Ethan was a stout, fortyish family man with the kind of fair skin that got ruddy if he so much as thought of a pretty day, and hair that was both blond and thinning.

Together, they looked at some of the worst evil the pits of hell could spit out and tried hard to set the world to rights again. Jackson figured they were aware that they couldn’t do it by themselves, but the fact that they kept trying garnered his everlasting respect.

With Tage at his heels, Jackson made his way through the twists and turns of the DA’s office, finding their underfunded, overwhelmed corner of the building from memory. He stepped up to the receptionist’s desk and gave a game smile.

“Hey, I was hoping I could—”

“Jackson?”

Jackson stared at the tiny woman with the short-cropped black hair and the many freckles across her upturned nose. “Mira? Oh my God, is that you?”

Jackson stepped around the desk to give Mira Charleston a tight hug. She squealed and kissed his cheek. “Oh my God! How you doing? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. You still banging everything